


only you will have stars that can laugh

by hihoplastic



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 02:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5726953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hihoplastic/pseuds/hihoplastic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She likes the curious ones - the ones who want to know how things work, why they work. People who don't take impossibilities for granted, but refuse to be captured by them. Cybermen loose on the streets of Paris - ruined a perfectly good lunch at L’Astrance - everyone running away screaming and Emma, running <i>toward</i> the firefight, toward danger, armed with nothing more than determination and a crowbar. </p><p>A crowbar against a legion of Cybermen. </p><p>Despite herself, Regina feels her lips pull at a smile. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>(DW universe, OUAT characters, with Regina as 'The Doctor' and Emma as her companion.  You don't need to know anything about DW to read this. I think.)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	only you will have stars that can laugh

**Author's Note:**

> \- For [Claire](http://plagueoftickles.tumblr.com/), who requested, _Emma and Regina + Doctor/Companion AU_. I hope you like it, hon!  
>  This was a blast to write, thank you!  
> \- I stole _a lot_ of ideas (and actual lines) from the DW miniepisodes, _Meanwhile in the TARDIS_ ([part one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfpnL39lNyY_%20) | [part two](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=005hhOPMK4U%20)) and Regina's line at the end is from the DW _5x01 The Eleventh Hour_  
>  \- If you haven't seen DW, here's a pic of [cybermen](http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070720145100/tardis/images/b/bd/Cybermen_in_France.jpg) and the TARDIS [outside](http://advancedgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1493_Tardis_46.jpg), [inside](https://scifiandtvtalk.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/who60.jpg) (Eleventh Doctor). I made up Regina's TARDIS' interior.  
> \- Title from _Le Petit Prince_ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Regina groans, looking at Emma’s slack-jawed face from behind the time rotor. 

“It’s—”

“Don't say it,” she snaps.

Emma swallows, but dutifully shuts her mouth. She’s barely left the doorway - already gone out twice and walked around the TARDIS in a stupor - her eyes wide and her skin, Regina thinks, a little green.

“And do _not_ throw up on my floors.” The TARDIS jabs petulantly at her thoughts, and Regina huffs. “Fine, _her_ floors.”

“ ‘Her’?” Emma asks, moving in a trance up the stairs, her hand on the railing like it might vanish at any moment. 

Not entirely unreasonable, Regina thinks, but still. 

“Sentient ship, she exists across all of space and time, and she doesn't like people _touching_ her,” she snaps, batting Emma’s hand away from the console when she reaches out to touch it.

“Sorry,” she mutters, holding her hand to her chest and looking up at the rotor with awe. “So it - she - can hear me?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Emma turns in a slow circle, taking in the white, cavernous walls, the black accents, the looming tree in the center that encases the time rotor, branches stretching up, up, so high she has to crane her neck, and even then the tops disappear into the dark. 

“Time machine?” she echoes Regina’s earlier words, still in disbelief.

“Yes,” Regina says, folding her arms across her chest as she watches Emma circle the room. “If you want to be dull about it.”

“Anywhere?”

Regina narrows her eyes, gesturing absently. “Are you going to manage sentences anytime soon, or—”

She's aware she sounds snappish - she always sounds snappish in this body - but instead of recoiling, Emma shakes her head and tries to focus.

“Sorry. Just…” She looks up at the tree again, and slowly, hesitantly, touches the bark. It's alive, of course, but Emma doesn't know that, and she gasps, her face splitting into a wide grin as she presses her palm more firmly to the wood. 

“This is unreal.”

Regina sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Close enough, I suppose.”

“But how—it can fly?”

Regina snorts. “Fly? How barbaric. No, it’s a TARDIS - Time and Relative Dimension In Space - capable of dematerializing at any point in space-time and rematerializing in another without traversing timelines or physical space.”

“It says ‘police’.”

“And?”

“Why does your _time machine_ say ‘police’?" 

“She has what’s called a chameleon circuit. It’s used to camouflage the TARDIS wherever it lands - a column in Ancient Rome, a taxi in New York—"

“And it...chooses a big blue box?” 

“Police telephone box,” she corrects. “From 1963.” Flipping a switch, Regina shrugs. “Circuit’s broken.”

“You have a faulty time machine?” 

Regina glowers. “She is _not_ faulty. I just… haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

A slow smile spreads across Emma’s face. “You like it, don’t you?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“You like the big blue box,” she says, “Stands out like a sore thumb, doesn’t quite fit in. Sounds familiar.” 

Regina pauses, Emma’s words too pointed, too close, but when she looks up, Emma is wandering the room again, freeing Regina from having to answer. 

Growing bolder, more curious and less dumbstruck, Emma circles the console, peering under it every so often. 

She likes the curious ones - the ones who want to know how things work, why they work. People who don't take impossibilities for granted, but refuse to be captured by them. Cybermen loose on the streets of Paris - ruined a perfectly good lunch at L’Astrance - everyone running away screaming and Emma, running _toward_ the firefight, toward danger, armed with nothing more than determination and a crowbar. 

A crowbar against a legion of Cybermen. 

Despite herself, Regina feels her lips pull at a smile. 

“What's its energy source?”

Blinking, she clears her head and resets her scowl firmly in place. “What?”

“I can't hear engines.”

Regina wings an eyebrow, almost impressed, and crosses to the scanner, Emma hovering behind her as she pulls up the TARDIS specifications. “The Eye of Harmony. Basically a black hole - deck twelve, I think this time. Also artron energy, huon energy, mercury, Zeiton 7, and a trachoid time crystal, though I think that's just for show and—” She halts at the glazed look on Emma’s face. “You're still stuck on the black hole, aren't you?”

“I’m still stuck on ‘sentient,’” Emma manages. “How big is it?”

“The TARDIS?” Regina shrugs. “How big can you imagine?”

Emma swallows audibly, watching as the scanner flashes through room after room. It’ll never end - she could grow old just sitting there watching the TARDIS cycle through her interior - so Regina switches off the screen and pushes it away. 

“So…it’ll definitely fit my bug, then,” Emma says, still looking a bit dizzy, and Regina wonders if she picked the wrong human after all. 

“I show you a time machine that includes - in addition to _an exploding star_ \- a forest the size of New Zealand, eleven hotels, twenty four castles, thirty different control rooms, nine beach resorts, and a pigeon farm, and you want to know if your _Volkswagen_ fits?”

Emma smirks at her, eyes bright and full of fire and wonder, and says, “You sure you want to end that speech with ‘pigeon factory’? Kinda takes the allure out of it - stars, forests, _flying rats—_ ”

“Shut up, Miss Swan.”

Emma grins as if she’d paid her a compliment. 

“Humans,” Regina mutters under her breath, and the TARDIS hums in agreement. 

“So those things back there,” Emma says after a moment, sounding more collected finally, “the robots—”

“Cybermen.”

“They'd have destroyed the city.”

Regina turns to face her, hip resting on the console while Emma stands a few paces away. “They'd have destroyed the planet. Assimilated everyone on it. Made an army, moved on to the next planet, so on and so forth.”

Emma frowns, troubled - they're always troubled, Regina thinks, by events that are so small. She’s grown so tired of that, of watching human eyes fill with tears, of seeing the horror on their faces, of trying to explain why races like the Daleks and the Cybermen exist. Why they do the things they do. Why innocent people suffer for it. 

Mainly, she thinks, because she has no answer. Still doesn't, even after everything she herself has done, the bloodshed she participated in. Bloodshed she caused. 

But Emma doesn't ask why. She doesn't look at Regina with wide, newly-haunted eyes and demand an explanation for why the city is in ruins. 

“And you…” Emma starts, licking her lips, “You… dropped out of the sky with a…” She waves her hand uselessly. “—metal pointy thing and saved the world.”

Regina bristles, feeling the weight of it in her pocket. “Screwdriver,” she defends. “It's sonic.”

“Saved the _world._ ”

Turning away, Regina fidgets with the console, turning off the sound and easing them into the vortex. “I was in the neighborhood.”

When Emma doesn't answer, she looks up to find the other woman glaring at her, arms folded over her chest. 

“No, literally. I was having lunch.”

“You came out of _nowhere._ No weapons, no army, just a screwdriver and a box and you - literally - stopped a giant army and saved _the entire planet_.” She enunciates the words slowly, as if Regina isn’t aware of what she’s done. As if she doesn’t know. “How?”

“I'm brilliant.”

“And modest.”

Regina snorts.

“Again, serious.” Regina frowns, and Emma purses her lips. “You left, before anyone could figure out it was you. Before they could thank you. You don't want praise, but it’s obvious you’ve done this before but why? Why risk your life to save a people you don't even know? Or seem to particularly like?”

“I like the adventure.”

“Lie.”

“Excuse me?”

“Didn't I tell you? It’s my special skill. Yours is apparently being rude and brilliant and mine is knowing when people are lying to me. You might like the adventure, _Doctor_ , but that's not the answer to my question.”

Regina clenches her jaw, swallowing down the explanation. It’s only one word, but with so much behind it, steeped in it, so much baggage and hope and pain she can't let it out. Not now, not yet, maybe not ever. 

Swallowing under Emma’s pointed gaze, she tilts her chin up and says, “I have to.”

“You have to?”

“Yes. And that's all you're getting.”

“Doctor—”

“I travel, I get into trouble, I help people, I travel some more, that's all there is to it.”

 _Liar,_ she thinks, but Emma doesn't read that one, or she does and doesn't comment. 

“So does disaster find you or do you find it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Uh, yeah. A lot, actually.”

Regina knows she’s right. Knows how dangerous it is - _she is_ \- to the people around her. The universe has made that much perfectly clear. 

“Well?” Emma insist, and Regina sighs, staring at the time rotor intently when she admits, 

“Both.”

“Anyone with that much power…”

Regina scoffs, anger rising in her throat. “What power?” She wishes she were powerful. Wishes she’d been strong enough, but she’s always been weak. Always the strange one, always wanting simple things while those around her strived for something more. _Powerful people don’t suffer, Regina,_ her mother had said, _They make others suffer for them._ Pushing the thought violently away, the voice in her head, she turns to Emma with a glower. “I've got a blue box and a screwdriver.”

“And you're smart. Like, _insanely_ smart. Inhuman smart.”

“I should hope so. Your species are idiots.”

“My species?”

Emma follows her as she moves to the other side of the console, entering coordinates. 

“Humans.”

She feels Emma’s gaze, looking her up and down with scrutiny. “You look human.”

“No, you look Time Lord,” she grumbles, aware of how petulant she sounds. “We came first.”

“So you're…an alien.”

“My ship, my home, _you're_ the alien.”

“Are you—”

Emma stops abruptly, and Regina huffs, turning to glare at her, fairly certain what she wants to ask. “What?”

“I mean is that really what you look like? Is it a disguise or…?”

 _There it is,_ Regina thinks - humans are so predictable.

“Yes,” she drawls, “out of all the creatures in the universe, most of them highly advanced, I chose the shape of a short Puerto Rican woman as a clever disguise so you can't see my green, inner slug.”

Emma stares at her, eyes going round and wide. “Really?”

“No!” she snaps, pushing a button on the console with more force than necessary. 

“Okay, sorry, I've just—never met an alien before. I mean, other than the ones that tried to kill me.”

Regina grumbles, but she’s not actually upset. She just has a grumbling face this go around. Snappish and grumbling. “They're not slugs either, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn't.” Emma says. Regina arches an eyebrow pointedly. “Okay, I was a little. But it’s amazing!” she insists, smile springing back to her face. “Like, I'm talking to an _actual alien_ right now. I _fought aliens_. That is just... I mean..." She sways a bit on her feet. "Can I sit down?" 

Regina gestures to the black leather sofa near the console, and Emma gratefully deposits herself in the center. Emma takes several slow, deep breaths, then blurts: “I can’t believe it’s bigger on the inside.” 

Regina groans - she hates that phrase - and keeps herself occupied at the console. Emma will need a room if she's staying - and somewhere to park that damn bug - and given that she's handling the whole 'aliens are real and most of them want to destroy' thing rather well, Regina's feeling a bit generous. Maybe a roman bath, a few hundred pairs of boots. She makes a note to have the TARDIS 'accidentally lose' that atrocious beanie, however—she has a reputation to maintain, and no one is going to be intimidated by a leggy blonde with permanent hat-hair. 

Entering the commands, Regina peers around the time rotor. "All right over there?"

"Yeah," Emma breathes, "Just—how many aliens, exactly?"

"What?"

"How many different species are there?"

Regina snorts. "Trust me, you can't count that high."

"Try me."

"Emma..." She looks up to find the woman standing next to her, arms folded across her chest. "Is that supposed to be intimidating?" When she doesn't budge, Regina sighs, walking around the console, flipping levers and pressing buttons as she goes, inputting commands. Emma follows her, curious and annoyed, and she resists the urge to smirk when the control room plunges into darkness, and Emma jumps. Before she can ask, Regina turns the last handle, and a large, bright projection of a cafe appears before them. 

"That's where we met."

"Twelve hours ago, yes. I still have the coffee stains on my shirt to prove it."

Emma flushes, but her attention is immediately drawn back when the projection zooms out, displaying a map of Paris, then a map of France, then Europe, then Earth. It rotates slowly, green and white and blue and Emma raises her hand almost reverently, but doesn't quite touch it. 

"Why are you showing me this?"

"At the beginning of the twenty first century, you've identified roughly nine million species that live on your planet alone. You've barely edged out of your own solar system, to say nothing of the solar systems in your immediate vicinity. Beyond that, you haven't even touched the rest of the galaxy." With each description, she zooms the projection out, showing Emma each stage, the galactic groups, the Virgo supercluster, all the way out, each pinprick of light in the dark room getting smaller and smaller and smaller. "This is your observable universe right now. 2016. This is what you know, or what you think you know."

"That's... incredible. And, horrifying. And awesome. I mean, I knew all that, but to see it like this..." She does touch the projection this time, a smile on her face when her hand simple passes through it, the stars cupped in her hand. 

"What your scientists have observed—it wouldn't even register on a map of the entire universe."

Emma turns to her, eyes wide. "Seriously?" 

"Different points in space time, planets are always shifting, stars always dying, entire species born and wiped out in the blink of an eye, comparatively speaking."

Emma half laughs. "Are you trying to freak me out?" 

"I'm trying to show you. Time travel... it changes you. In ways that are unpredictable, and wonderful, but not always pretty. If you come with me, this—" She gestures at the projection. "—this is your reality. And once you start down that road, you can't ever go back." 

Nodding slowly, Emma stares at the projection, innumerable tiny lights illuminating the dark control room. "I grew up in the foster system. My parents—they abandoned me when I was a baby. I never had family. I watched so many kids find home, but it was never me, and I just felt so... lonely. All the time. It's never really gone away. But this..." She touches the map again. "I wish I'd known." Turning, she looks at Regina with bright, bittersweet eyes. "How could anyone be lonely, when there's all this _life_ out there?"

"That's one way of looking at it."

"You've got all of this right outside your doorstep, every hour of every day. The entire universe is your backyard," she murmurs, almost reverently, and Regina nods, but she doesn't feel it. The excitement. The mystery. 

She used to, a long time ago. Before Daniel. Before the war. Before—

She stops herself, abruptly throwing the switch to kill the projection and bring up the lights, fiddling with the gold ring on her finger to calm herself. To bury the ache that threatens, at every hour of every day, to claim her. 

“So why aren't you happy?”

Regina startles. “Excuse me?”

“You're sad,” Emma observes, soft but not sympathetic. Not pitying. “Really sad.”

“So are you,” Regina retorts. 

Emma shrugs. “I’m an orphan. I'm a loner. I don't trust people. But I don't try to hide it.” She tilts her head slightly. “Do you have friends, Doctor?”

The word is almost foreign now. “What?”

“Friends. Family. People you care about.”

Regina purses her lips and thinks of the Time War. Of Daniel. She thinks of Snow and her father and Henry, always, constantly, thinking about Henry, but drawing him to the forefront of her mind makes her weak. Makes her eyes brim. This body cries easily. 

The last one hadn't cried at all. 

“I don't either,” Emma says softly. “If I go with you,” —and she will, Regina knows. She can always tell— “no one will miss me.”

She thinks they're kindred, and in a way she’s right. They're both on their own. Self-reliant. Paranoid. She knows without asking that Emma’s been through more than most, but it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough. 

900 years is a lot to carry. Too much, sometimes, and Emma hasn't done the things she’s done. Probably doesn't even know such choices can be made. 

But she’s hurting, like Regina, and a bit lost, and that they have in common. That they can share. 

Throwing the last lever, Regina extends the air shield and parks them in space. “Open the door.”

“What? Why?”

“Just do it, Swan.”

“But we haven’t—” she starts, then freezes as she pulls open the door. “...moved.”

Regina smirks, wandering up to stand behind her, leaning against the wall. 

“The Howling Nebula,” she explains. “Most of the planets are uninhabitable, but there’s a plant that grows on the ninth moon that, when the wind passes through it, sounds like it’s shrieking. Some people think you can hear it from space, if you listen closely enough. Thus the name.”

Emma nods, a bit breathless as she asks, “When are we?”

Regina sticks her head out the door and sniffs - it’s mostly for show, but Emma doesn't need to know that. 

“It’s the year 1100 PI - Post-Independence - after the Third Great Intergalactic War. We’re thirteen million years in your personal future.”

Emma stares, mouth open again. “Shut. Up.”

Regina rolls her eyes. “Remind me never to rely on your verbal skills for anything.”

Emma throws her a passing glare, but she’s quickly drawn back to the sight before her, colors swirling together like a Van Gogh, bright points of light interspersed between the red and gold gases. 

It isn't until she hears a sniffle beside her that Regina realizes Emma has her fist pressed against her mouth and her eyes are bright and wet. 

“Are you…crying?”

She’s aware she sounds appalled - maybe even a little disgusted, or at the very least apprehensive - but Emma merely shoots her a glare before sniffling again, pressing her palm over her heart. 

“It’s so beautiful.” 

Regina frowns. “The Nebula?”

Emma nods, a small, quiet smile on her face, and it’s the first time Regina’s seen it in a long time - seen something akin to real joy. 

Licking her lips, she clears her throat, making sure to keep her eyes fixed on the Nebula to avoid Emma’s gaze. 

“When you make all of time and space your backyard, that's what you eventually get - a backyard. I was here when the first star in this Nebula was born and I was there when the last one died. I've been to the end of the universe and the end of time itself and when I look at this I see gases and elements and bits of rock but you… You see it for what it is.”

“Why me? Why not the others?” she asks, and Regina knows she’s referring to the small handful of humans that had helped - that ran into the fire. A young soldier. A student. An elderly man with nothing left to lose. “They did more to help than I did.”

Regina shrugs, pushing them out of her mind as she moes back toward the console, needing the physical distance, a barrier between them. “I like blondes.”

Emma snorts, but pulls her attention away from the Nebula completely. She closes the doors but stays below, one foot on the bottom stair. “Seriously. I think I deserve the truth if I'm going to run away with you in a space ship.”

“TARDIS.”

“Whatever.”

She moves slowly, steps deliberate as she rounds the console. Regina grinds her teeth - she hates when they ask, hates having to justify her choices. She doesn't always know why that person, on that day - sometimes it’s some buried glimmer in their eye, sometimes a sentence, sometimes an action. Sometimes there’s nothing at all, and she takes the person anyway. 

Emma, she knows, wasn't that simple. 

“You stood up to me,” she says finally. “Everyone was perfectly willing to go along with my plan, except you.”

Emma bows her head, guilt flashing across her features. “I was wrong.”

She thinks of the cost - 38 people trapped in the warehouse. 38 people to save millions or billions or more. No one had hesitated. Everyone agreed. 

Except Emma. 

Emma, with her bright eyes and her anger and her refusal to let Regina endanger them, not for the world, not for anyone. _You're doing this because it’s convenient!_ she’d shouted. _There are 38 people still alive in there. Find another way._

“No you weren't,” Regina sighs. “Not to try.” When Emma doesn't answer, she tightens her voice and says firmly, “You tried to save them.”

“I failed.”

They lost the 38 people, but also the student, and the old man. There’s no guarantee they’d have lived with Regina’s initial plan, but Emma feels responsible. Feels like her actions cost lives. 

“It doesn't matter.”

Emma’s neck snaps up, eyes bright with rage and guilt. “How can you—”

“In the grand scheme of the universe, the enormity of it, three human lives, a hundred, a thousand lives do not, on any cosmic scale, matter,” Regina snaps; Emma stares back at her as if struck, and she exhales slowly, giving herself enough time to prepare before she adds, “That's what I tell myself. That's how I'm able to make the choices I make and keep going.”

Emma nods slowly, and Regina can see the moment she understands, the moment she truly _gets it_. 

“You need someone to stop you.”

 _Yes,_ Regina thinks. Says: “As if you could. No. I need someone to remind me.”

“Remind you of what?”

“That it’s more than just star stuff.”

Emma nods slowly. “And…you think I'm that person?”

Regina smirks, glancing pointedly at the console. “Why don't we find out?”

Emma grins, that look they all get, _kid in a candy shop_ , and then—

“Wait, how does this work? I just disappear with you? I don't even have a change of clothes.”

“The TARDIS will provide everything you need or want.”

Emma bites her lip, and somehow Regina knows what she’s going to ask. 

“Can we go get my bug?”

Regina groans, throwing the TARDIS into flight. If it’s a little bumpier than usual, and if Emma’s tossed around a bit, she’ll never admit her guilt. “Fine. But no skid marks, no oil spills, and we’re not stopping every other planet for you to so some kind of intergalactic maintenance.”

Emma beams, mock saluting, even as Regina keeps muttering under her breath, “Don't you have a smaller security blanket” and “I don't know where you think you're going to drive the damn thing…”

“What, they don't have cars on Neptune?”

“Cars on—” She starts, almost offended by the idiocy, until a better idea comes to mind. “Of course not,” she says primly. “Neptali don't have eyes. Or thumbs, at least not since the Makro gas spill in 5134. Makes steering difficult.”

“You're kidding.” Emma says. Regina merely blinks at her. “You're _not_ kidding. I—” Regina smirks, and Emma moans, shaking her head. “You've _got_ to stop doing that. It makes me feel like an idiot.”

“Why do you think I do it?”

Emma huffs, but she stands close, her shoulder brushing Regina’s as she eases them out of the Vortex. 

“So, Miss Swan. All of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will…where do you want to start?”

She thinks for a moment - short to a human, impatient ages to a Time Lord - then finally smiles. 

“Emma,” she says, her smile so bright. “You can start by calling me Emma.”


End file.
